On
Saturday the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al Abadi, announced that
the last remnants of Iraq territory had been liberated from ISIS and
proclaimed, “Dear
Iraqis, your land has been completely liberated, and your towns and
villages have been returned to the homeland. The dream of liberation
became a reality. ISIS dream has come to an end." It was only
three and half years ago that the ISIS dream began.

In
June 2014, ISIS leader Abu-Bakr al- Baghdadi stunned the world by
mounting the minbar-pulpit
of the medieval al Nouri Mosque located in the old section of Mosul,
the largest city conquered by the hybrid terrorist-army group, and
declaring himself Caliph. As the “successor of the Prophet” and
“Shadow of God on Earth” his spokesmen declared it was incumbent
on Muslims around the world to migrate to the newly proclaimed holy
state. Tens of thousands of Muslims from Europe, Central Asia,
Russia, the Middle East, North America and Africa partook in hijra,
religious migration, to this utopian theocracy in the desert. Their
dream was to establish a “divine state” where Allah’s laws
prevailed, not man’s. Those forging the state at the barrel of a
gun emulated the glory of the Medieval Abbasid Caliphates who ruled
an empire stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.

But
the “Caliphate” established by al-Baghdadi, and his fanatical
followers was more akin to the terrorist movement of the medieval
Kharijites (a fanatical group that terrorized the Muslim world in the
aftermath of the Prophet Mohammed’s death) or the Hashisihuns (the
medieval Ismaili Shiite sect known as the Assassins), than the
glorious Caliphate of the Abbasid Dynasty based in Baghdad. ISIS’s
capital of Raqqa in the north central Syrian desert was a heart of
darkness whose main square was routinely festooned with the
decapitated heads of “sinners, sorcerers, apostates, infidels,
fornicators, thieves and the enemies of God.” Raqqa was a far cry
from the court in Baghdad of the famed Medieval caliph, Harun al
Rashid who briefly held his court in this very city.

But
for all of its depravity, the ISIS caliphate, which stretched from
the Turkish-Syrian border at Jarabalus, down the Euphrates valley
through northeastern Syria and into the Sunni lands in western Iraq,
and up to Mosul in the north, had economic clout stemming from its
control of the rich oil fields in eastern Syria’s Deir es Zor
province, taxation of the eight million inhabitants in its
Britain-sized territory, and criminal activity. At its height, the
ISIS shariah-law theocracy also deployed an army of as many as 40,000
fighters who were far more willing to sacrifice themselves for their
cause and incur losses to win battles than the famed Iraqi Kurdish
Peshmerga forces who had become something of a “checkpoint army”
since their liberation from Saddam Hussein in 2003. The
Shiite-dominated Iraqi army was riven with sectarianism and filled
with “ghost soldiers” (soldiers who paid half their salary to
their commander to stay at home). For its part, the Syrian Army was
engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against Sunni rebels in
western Syria and was similarly incapable of fending off the ISIS
conquests in the north and east. Other more moderate Sunni rebel
groups in Syria lacked ISIS’s numbers, organization and ferocity,
and the 2 million Kurds in northern Syria had only light weapons and
no record of military experience thus far.

The
last factor, the untried nature of the Kurds of northern Syria, was,
however, about to change in the fall of 2014 and winter of 2015 when
the “ever expanding ISIS caliphate” pushed north into their
homeland known as Rojava (the Land of the Setting Sun). Rojava was
made up of three enclaves known as Hasakah, Kobane, in the east, and
the isolated enclave Afrin in the far west. It was here that
President Obama decided to make a stand against the expanding ISIS
terror state and commenced a surrogate war known as Operation
Inherent Resolve. This campaign involved using local proxies on the
ground as “firemen” to put out the ISIS inferno that was
spreading across the region, instead of redeploying division-sized
forces to the killings sands of the Middle East. In the war Obama
envisioned, it was to be the Kurds and the Arabs who would plunge
into the back alleys of hellholes like Fallujah or the vast Syrian
desert to fight ISIS, not American troops.

Central
Command planned on using the tactics perfected by Green Beret
commander Colonel John Mulholland in Afghanistan in 2001. It was
Mulholland who leveraged local Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara anti-Taliban
rebels to overthrow the Pashtun Taliban with the support of special
force combat controllers (i.e. spotters armed with laser target
designators for bombers). President Obama and Central Command made
the bold decision to ignore Turkey’s fear of PKK Kurdish secession
in its eastern provinces and arm and support the PKK-linked Syrian
Kurds as a surrogate force.

The
alliance between the untried Socialist Kurds who had thousands of
female fighters in their ranks and the US was to be resoundingly
successful in turning the ISIS tide. In a seesawing battle for the
defense of Kobane, the “Kurdish Stalingrad,” the Kurdish
fighters, supported by American GPS and laser-guided bombs and armed
with U.S. light infantry weapons, succeeded in turning the tide of
ISIS expansion in a bloody five month battle that was watched by the
world.

Having
repulsed the seemingly unstoppable ISIS war machine by January 2015,
the Syrian Kurds, who were led by war-hardened PKK Kurdish commanders
from Turkey (and disgruntled Christian and Muslim Arabs), gathered
momentum and moved in a southeasterly direction down the Euphrates
valley conquering ISIS lands from 2015 to the fall of 2017. With an
initial 500 American “training and assisting” boots on the
ground, later supported by Marine artillery units armed with 155
millimeter artillery, howitzers and HIMARs (satellite guided cannons
that shoot small shells) the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces
(SDF) finally liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa on October 17,
2017. By this time, the Kurds had been given heavier weaponry to help
them engage urban warfare and the number of US troops in Syria had
risen to 2,000. At the same time, the Syrian Army liberated much of
the province of Deir es Zor in the east and the two forces, one
backed by the US and one by Russia, are currently squaring off, much
as the Soviets and Americans did after defeating the Nazis in Berlin.

Meanwhile,
in the ISIS-occupied Sunni lands of western and northern Iraq, U.S.
Green Berets from the 5th Group and Navy SEALs worked with Iraqi Army
troops, especially the revamped special forces, to retake the
heartland of what was once known as the Sunni Triangle; namely the
cities Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Baiji, in 2016. From there, the
Iraqi security forces and Iranian-backed Shiite militias loosely
aligned to the Iraqi government moved up the Tigris river to attack
the great ISIS bastion of Mosul, home to 2 million people.

The
ISIS fighters had had three years to turn Mosul into a fortress and
had created street-by-street barriers made up of piled cars and
concrete berms and they had blasted holes through the walls of
connecting houses to create passageways for their fighters. In
addition, they had mined streets and fields with IEDs, created sniper
overwatches on buildings, purchased hundreds of drones to be used to
drop grenades and IEDs on the enemy, and had trained hundreds of
suicide bombers to drive SVBIEDs (suicide vehicle borne improvised
explosive devices) into invading troops. To compound matters, they
had corralled hundreds of thousands of Mosul’s civilians to be used
as human shields.

Arrayed
against the ISIS force of approximately 15,000 fanatical fighters dug
into Mosul was a jostling coalition of 50,000 Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters from the semi-independent Kurdistan in the northeast of
Iraq, Iranian backed PMU (Popular Mobilization Unit) militias, and
Iraqi security forces. These local forces were backed up by as many
as 5,000 U.S. troops who supported the Kurds and Arabs with HIMARs
from Qayyarah West Airfield to the south. On the front lines, Green
Beret, Air Force Special Operation and Navy Seal “Ghost Soldiers”
served as JTACs (Joint Terminal Attack Controllers i.e. spotters to
call in “air artillery” from U.S. aircraft).

In
a battle known as “Operation Nineveh We Are Coming,” that began
on October 16th, 2016 the U.S.-supported Coalition moved first into
east Mosul and fought predominately foreign fighters protecting the
more modern half of the city located on the Western banks of the
Tigris. Having taking this half of the city in fierce street fighting
that took a heavy toll on both sides, the Iraqi security forces and
Iranian-backed militias fought their way through the labyrinth of
winding streets that made up the older western half of the city (the
Kurds had halted their advance on the eastern edges of this city the
Iraqi that government claimed as part of a previous agreement).

Finally,
in late June of 2017, the Iraqi President Haider al Abadi announced
that the Al- Nouri Mosque, the very site of “Caliph Baghdadi’s”
triumphant declaration of the Caliphate three years earlier in June
2014, and the city of Mosul had fallen. Iraqi troops then liberated
the remaining ISIS held cities of Tel Afar, Hawija, al Qaim and Rawa
in northern Iraq by mid November 2017. Al Baghdadi a.k.a. “God’s
Shadow on Earth” was last seen ignominiously driving into the vast
Syrian desert in a yellow taxi cab after exhorting his remaining
followers to fight to death to hold the last two ISIS towns in
western Iraq, al Qaim and Rawa, to fight to the death.

Thus the quixotic dream of the
Jihadists was overthrown in three and a half years and the physical
state that Baghdadi and his followers were so proud of having created
(and having thus superseded Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Al Qaeda) was no
more. President Obama was resoundingly vindicated in his “standoff”
approach to proxy war, despite the attacks of his Republican critics
who claimed he had engaged in “retrenchment” and had “let the
Middle East burn.” During my journeys to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2016
and 2017, I found widespread appreciation for “Obomba” among
Kurdish troops on the frontlines facing Mosul, and in Syria it was
common for Kurds to name their children Obama. Central Command’s
policy of working “by with and through” local forces had been a
resounding success and it had not taken the tens of thousands of
troops Obama’s critics had been calling for to defeat ISIS.

ISIS
has now been rolled back and destroyed at the cost of less than a
dozen American combat KIAs (Killed in Action) and at a cost of just
$10.7 billion dollars (compared to approximately 4,500 Americans and
$3 trillion resulting from President Bush’s Operation Iraqi
Freedom). As the jihadists’ bodies are bulldozed into the ruins of
booby-trapped basements and houses in Mosul, ancient Yazidi
worshippers of pre-Abrahamic gods (who were defined as “devil
worshippers” by ISIS) are freed, strict sharia
laws overturned,
Hisbah
religious police and ISIS members imprisoned, one burning question
remains; has the jinn
or genie of ISIS been banished to the wastelands of Badiyat
al-Sham (The Syrian
desert) where approximately 3,000 fighters are said to be holding
out?

Jihad
From the Ashes: The Continuing Threat of ISIS

Sadly,
the almost Phoenix-like ability of the Arab Sunni jihadists to arise
from the ashes of their 2007-2008 US defeat at the hands of General
David Petraeus’ troop surge (and Sunni Anbar Awakening) would seem
to indicate that the underlying tensions that created smoldering
fires of Sunni resentment can be fanned again, if conditions are
right. For example, if the Iranian-backed Shiite militias that played
such a key role in the liberation of Sunni cities in Iraq (whose
fighters are more loyal to Ayatollah Khamenei than the Iraqi
government), engage in anti-Sunni sectarian activities. There is also
the fear that the millions of young Sunnis who lived in the caliphate
and were indoctrinated as the “cubs of the Caliphate” for three
and a half years have embraced the anti-Rafidah
(a hateful name for Shiite) policies of ISIS. To compound matters,
approximately 3 million people remain displaced in Iraq and the vast
majority of them are Sunnis who feel that they can expect little help
from their own Shiite-dominated government. One of these bemoaned his
sect’s plight in November 2017 stating “We
are now a displaced people, a completely marginalized people — and
it’s getting worse by the day. We have a corrupt government
controlled by a foreign power [Iran], at the expense of Sunnis.”i

The burning
issue that originally galvanized the awakening of Iraqi jihad in the
form of Al Qaeda in Iraq/ISIS (i.e. the disenfranchisement of Sunnis
in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion) has been tampered, for the time
being, by Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al Abadi’s outreach to
Sunnis. Abadi has attempted to undo the damage done by his
predecessor, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who repressed
Sunnis after the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal. But power still evades
the long-ruling Sunnis’ grasp and deep grievances remain as Shiites
are in power in Baghdad and Alawites in Damascus, two famed centers
of the Sunni Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates. Many Sunnis do not feel
that they have a stake in the democratic (but Shiite-dominated) Iraq
the US created in 2003 or in Assad’s Syria.

As the
defeated survivors of the collapse of the short-lived dawla
(Islamic state) retreat and re-calibrate to insurgency mode, the
dream of the re-establishment of Sunni rule and a holy state with
roots in the Middle Ages remains. There is still a vast insurgent
network in Iraq’s Sunni lands whose followers think not in
day-to-day terms, but in millennial terms. For them, this is a
generational struggle and, much like the resilient Taliban who boldly
proclaimed “America might have the watches, but we have time,”
their grievances will be passed on to a new generation.

ISIS had
clearly mutated back to its original insurgency mode and its
resilient historical re-enactors take inspiration from the Quran and
hadiths (saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammad). Its followers
seek the
fulfillment of ancient prophecy, and even accept that their “holy”
movement will come close to extinction, before returning to power.
ISIS members take heart in these words of the Prophet: "A
victorious band of warriors from my followers shall continue to fight
for the truth, despite being deserted and abandoned, they will be at
the gates of Jerusalem and its surroundings, and they will be at the
gates of Damascus and its surroundings."

The
resilient nature of the Islamist militant jinn
that was unleashed by 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the
continued nature of the threat posed by what is now “ISISism” as
an idea or ideology, is best demonstrated by three recent events that
represent the triad of post-Caliphate aiqtiham
(whirlwind attack) threats posed by the down-but-far-from-beaten
Sunni jihadists. Below are three ways ISIS will continue to
terrorize, even though their state has been “degraded and
destroyed” by Kurdish SDF fighters, U.S. combat controllers, Iraqi
Golden Division Special Forces, Iranian Revolutionary Guard-trained
Iraqi militias, and Kurdish Peshmergas.

Insurgent
aiqtihams.
In September 2017, as their capital was about to fall, ISIS announced
that it would switch from frontal warfare back to nikaya,
a war of attrition based on guerilla attacks and traditional
insurgent tactics. Soon thereafter, on September 14th 2017, ISIS
militants dressed as Iraqi Army soldiers struck to the south in the
Shiite city of Nasariya and attacked a checkpoint far from their
northern Iraqi Sunni lands. There, they slaughtered 74 Shiites, many
of them Iranians who had begun to travel and work extensively in post
2003 Iraq. This attack demonstrated to all that the Sunni insurgent
demon created by Abu Musab Zarqawi in 2003 to fight the American
invaders and Shiites was alive and well, despite the loss of the
Caliphate.

Meanwhile,
in northern Syria, on October 23, 2017, six days after Raqqa fell,
ISIS militants stormed into the town of Qaryatayn and killed as many
as 116 residents whom they accused of being collaborators with the
Kurds and Syrian government. The militants had a “kill list” and
went from door to door executing “traitors to Islam” in cold
blood. Later in early November 2017, ISIS fighters launched a
surprise counter-attack on the town of Albu Kamal in eastern Syria
which has been their final stronghold in that country.

These
incidents would indicate that ISIS will continue to wage
insurgent/terror war in its original base in Iraq and to a lesser
extent in eastern Syria.

Affiliate
aiqtihams.
On October 3, 2017, at roughly the time Raqqa fell to the SDF Kurds
and Arabs in central Syria, hundreds of miles away ISIS would achieve
its single greatest battlefield victory over America. Having been
denied the opportunity to kill large numbers of Americans in Iraq and
Syria due to the prudent nature of the proxy war strategy waged by
Obama since 2014 and continued by Trump for the last nine months,
ISIS carried out an ambush on U.S. forces operating in the massive,
eastern African country of Niger.

There, an
ISIS affiliate or ‘franchise’ known as The Islamic State in the
Greater Sahara led by an amir
named Adnan Sahwari launched an ambush on a twelve-man Green Beret
A-Team carrying out a reconnaissance mission alongside 30 Nigerien
troops in a hostile village known as Tongo Tongo. In the ambush, four
Green Beret Special Forces were killed, along with five Nigerien
troops, by approximately 50 ISIS fighters driving “technicals”
(pickup trucks with anti-aircraft mounted guns in the rear bed) and
armed with rocket propelled grenades, and automatic rifles.

In the
following month, an ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan (the Wilayat al
Khorosan or Afghan Province) suicide bomber tried infiltrating a
wedding in Kabul on November 16th. When he was stopped by police at
the entrance to the wedding hall, he detonated his bomb and killed
eight policemen and two civilians. The target of the bombing was an
opposition politician in attendance at the wedding. This attack had
been proceeded by an ISIS suicide storming of one of Afghanistan’s
most popular television channels, Shamshad, which killed several
staff members and put it off the air. An ISIS suicide bombing of a
Shiite mosque a few weeks earlier left twenty dead.

But the
death toll from the ISIS affiliate attacks in Afghanistan and Niger
paled in comparison to that stemming from the ISIS Sinai franchise
slaughter of 309 Sufi Muslims belonging to a mystic order known as
the Jarirya. Condemning the Jariryas as “sorcerers,” the
terrorists attacked their main mosque, known as the al Rawda, in four
trucks flying the ISIS banner. They set off bombs, mowed down
panicked worshipers with automatic weapons, and even shot at
ambulances arriving to assist the wounded. When the carnage was over
27 children were among the dead and 128 were injured in Egypt’s
deadliest terror attack.

The
death of the American Green Berets in an African land hundreds of
miles to west of Raqqa, of Sufi Muslims far to the south, and of
Afghans hundreds of miles to its east, shows how far ISIS’s
ideology has spread. ISIS “force multipliers” have been very
successful in “grafting” their tactics and ideology onto
pre-existing, but often previously less radical movements. The
violent dream of ISIS will continue to inspire local groups or
loosely affiliated cells to join the umbrella organization/cause and
carry out jihadi mayhem in Africa and Eurasia, despite the fall of
what Iraqi President Abadi called “the false Caliphate.”

Lone
wolf terror aiqtihams.
On Halloween day 2017, an Uzbekistani immigrant to America, who had
had the good fortune of winning the green card lottery and becoming a
legal resident, paid back his new American hosts by plowing a rented
truck through dozens of bicyclists cycling on a bike path near the
new One World Trade Center. Eight riders and pedestrians were killed
in the nearly mile long rampage and many more injured before Sayfullo
Saipov was shot and arrested after chanting “Allahu Akbar!” He
left a note in his car declaring his allegiance to ISIS and
proclaimed that the Caliphate was “enduring,” despite its loss of
a state, and asked for an ISIS banner to be hung in his hospital
room.

In this
sense, Saipov, a “self-starter” armchair jihadist who had not
been trained or dispatched to attack the US by ISIS, was sadly
correct. A second attack took place on the New York subway on
December 11 2017 when a Bangladeshi immigrant with no criminal
history set off an improvised explosive device. While no one was
killed in the failed bombing due to a problem with the bomb, had it
gone off in the rush hour commute the results could have been far
worse.

The
poisonous message of the terror caliphate endures online and its
jihadi ‘after-life’ means that it is in many ways
‘non-biodegradable.’ An
Al Qaeda affiliate known as al-Qastantiyyah recently captured the
hate of ISIS members that still circulates on the internet when one
of its members posted a message which read
“I wish
that I could travel to Europe or America or Australia and, by Allah,
burn their children with oil in place of their men and women. I would
not choose a market, club, shopping center, or park … no ... no …
no …. I would choose a kindergarten and a maternity hospital to
slaughter them.”

Internet-enabled
self-starters whom ISIS describes as “soldiers of the Caliphate,”
like the ones who carried out attacks in Nice, Manchester, San
Bernardino, Orlando and Manhattan, will most likely continue. Recent
history, including the Trump administration’s decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, would seem to indicate that there
are plenty of grievances to galvanize new attacks. The odds are high
that there will be more “lone wolf” or “wolf pack” cell
jihadists who answer the chilling online call to action by an ISIS
spokesman on December 4, 2017: “O
monotheists, you have enough time to equip your car and run over them
or buy a knife to stab them or filling your weapon with ammunition or
if your soul rejects all of that, engulf in their crowds and shout
Allah Akbar, God is the Great.”

The
Challenges of a Post-Caliphate War on ISIS

When President Trump heard about
the October 2017 “do it yourself” terror attack in Manhattan by
Sayfullo
Saipov, he tweeted:
“ISIS
just claimed the degenerate animal who killed, and so badly wounded,
the wonderful people on the West Side, was ‘their soldier.’ Based
on that, the military has hit ISIS ‘much harder’ over the last
two days. They will pay a big price for every attack on us!”
Trump
later told reporters that “every time we are attacked from this
point forward … we are hitting them 10 times harder.”

But by this
time, there were very few targets left for U.S. bombers to hit as the
ISIS state had been all but destroyed. And this demonstrates the
frustrating nature of counterterrorism when it involves an idea that
inspires and radicalizes men like Saipov who do not appear on the
FBI’s radar and cannot be killed with laser guided munitions in
Syria. There are ongoing counter terrorism investigations of
suspected ISIS sympathizers in all fifty states, but this has not
prevented “soldiers of the Caliphate” from carrying out
“self-starter” mayhem from San Bernardino, California to Orlando,
Florida to New York. No amount of GPS-guided munitions or wiretapping
can prevent home grown radicals from one day deciding to drive a
truck into crowds of innocents as has been done in Nice, London, New
York and Berlin.

The shamal
(desert winds) of hate spawned by the 2003 American toppling of the
ruling Sunnis from power and the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq/ISIS, will
continue to swirl around the world inspiring fanatical rage among
armchair jihadists, affiliates, and insurgents in Syria and Iraq,
regardless of the defeat of the physical state. The Bush
administration and the Neo-Con schemers dreamed of spreading
Jeffersonian democracy across the Islamic world when the blundered
into Iraq, but their plan to sow the seeds of democracy inadvertently
reaped the whirlwind of jihad which has killed tens of thousands.

The aiqtihams
that were sown by the 2003 toppling of Iraq’s centuries-old Sunni
rule will continue to gust across the Islamic world from the
ISIS-related insurgency in Mindanao, Philippines, to Niger in western
Africa, to the Sinai (where the most active branch of ISIS remains),
to Libya, and Europe. They will most likely buffet the shores of
distant North America again as well. Tragically, it seems likely that
the storm winds of jihad will continue to be unleashed by ISIS
sleeper cells, lone-wolves, battle hardened “franchisers,” and
desert insurgents who will fulfill one of “Caliph” Ibrahim/Al
Baghdadi’s final, hate-filled commands, “Turn the nights of the
unbelievers into days. Wreak havoc in their land … and make their
blood flow as rivers.”

i“As
ISIS is Driven from Iraq, Sunnis Remain Alienated.” New
York Times. October
26, 2017.